In his last exhibition at Eight Modern in 2010, Levine presented work that paid tribute to the popular music and musicians that he loved. Levine’s most recent work flirts with the conventions of minimalism. His rounded edges have been sharpened and new colors clash or flash in fluorescents. However, though the artist has embraced the rectangle and the right angle, his work has not lost its characteristic playfulness and sensuality.

Levine’s medium is colored pencil on paper. Using Prismacolor colored pencils, he builds up forms and fields of profoundly saturated color with numberless pencil strokes and buffing the surfaces to a smooth, waxy finish. The Boston Globe noted that “the colors, the nearly invisible pencil marks, and the rhythms of the geometry add up to a brassy, crisp, albeit unsettling homage…Levine is rising to his task, and he does it with color, texture, white space, and an uneasy sense that order is coming undone.”

David X. Levine uses a heavy application of colored pencils and ink on paper to create painterly works, a painstaking process that takes tens to hundreds of hours of manual labor depending on the size of the piece, which can range from six inches to five feet.

Levine’s abstract art has vibrant, striking colors, and his unusual method of millions of pencil strokes gives his work a duality of being hard and soft, straight and curved. His illusory forms can seem neither two- nor three-dimensional.

His work has been described as rhythmic, and indeed it is at a fundamental level. Many of his pieces are inspired by specific songs, usually rock and jazz, and the artist has even been commissioned by individuals to create art based on a particular song. Levine’s art sometimes includes hand-written passages from the songs that inspire them, uniting the sensory experience of listening with the visual language of abstraction. Many of his works walk the line between figurative and abstract, while his somewhat anthropomorphic figures and the contrast of his bright colors can seem surrealistic.